Oddbinned work
Well, after a quick comment on the CR Blog about the new Little Chef rebrand by Venturethree, and how a similar approch might have worked with Oddbins, we were happy to discover the work – and opinions – of designer David Thompson.
It seem as though David was commissioned to develop a fresh look for the ailing (now dead!) wine chain, but his work was never used. As he explains:
Grogger…
The demise of Oddbins is sad but a rebrand may not have saved them – given the way most people buy wine today. The business models have changed, but Oddbins didn’t, and it’s probably just another high street sector that the Tesco juggernaut has killed off.
My main problem with the Oddbins approach is that they focused on an existing/ageing market base and forgot that as their customers got older, they might want to think about attracting new ones.
I could go on in detail about what we proposed to re-awaken the brand and give it renewed vigour (which all fell on deaf ears). And I seriously doubt we were the first to try (and fail).
The most obvious creative suggestion was to renew the personality injected by Gerald Scarfe, and we proposed several quality illustrators to pick up where he left off… Sanna Annukka to name one (this was three years ago).
But the owner didn’t see a problem, didn’t ‘get-it’ and was happy with the existing bland culture, so there was no appetite to move forward and the rest is history. Perhaps it was our failure also for not getting these points across.
A shame.
We love what David had done for the brand. Simple, bold and with a sense of humour befitting of Oddbins. It’s uncomplicated, but still retains the hand-drawn hotch-potch aesthetic that many of us who worked at Oddbins remember from handwriting tasting notes and painting windows. See more of the project on David’s website here.
